Remembering the Holocaust

Southwest Louisiana residents have the opportunity to educate themselves on the Holocaust over the next few days and reflect
on the misery and tragedy of man’s cruelty to his fellow man.

Yom HaShoah, which remembers the victims of the Holocaust, will be observed in Lake Charles tonight and on Monday, April 28.

An exhibit, “The Holocaust: 1933-1945” will open at 5 p.m. today and run through Tuesday, April 29, at the Carnegie Library,
411 Pujo St. Eighteen posters depicting Jewish life prior to the Holocaust and the persecution, deportation, concentration
camps and Nuremberg trials will be displayed. The posters were discovered last year in McNeese’s Frazer Library.

McNeese State University professors Mark Wygoda and Robert Cooper will conduct readings at 6 p.m.

Wygoda will read excerpts from his
father’s memoirs, “Shadow of the Swastika.” Hermann Wygoda was a witness
to the Holocaust
and fought against the Nazis as a smuggler into the Warsaw ghetto
and a courier and by leading a 2,500-member fighting force
in northern Italy. Hermann Wygoda received honors from three
nations after the war, including a Bronze Star for Valor from
the United States.

Cooper will read poems from his book, ‘‘The Camp, a Memory Book, 1942-1945.’’

It is fitting that Yom HaShoah observances annually across the world recall the nearly 6 million Jews who were murdered by
the Nazis and their sympathizers. Four million other political dissidents, Poles, Gypsies, Jehovah Witnesses, homosexuals
and the handicapped also fell victim to the Nazis’ insanity.

‘‘Jews happened to be the major victims of that event,’’ Jeshujahu Weinberg, the one-time director of the Holocaust Museum
in Washington, D.C. once said, ‘‘but it is certainly relevant for everybody.’’

Relevant now when hardly a day goes by without some merchant of hate in the Middle East calling for the obliteration of Israel
and all Jews.

Relevant now when last week a white supremacist allegedly fatally shots three people at two Jewish facilities in Kansas City,
Mo.

Relevant now when Jews in the Ukraine last week were ordered to register with the government or face deportation or having
their property seized.

We should never forget the horrors of the Holocaust. Tonight and next week, we have a time to remember.